Schroeder suffers big blow in German state vote
By James Mackenzie
Reuters
Sunday, May 22, 2005; 12:58 PM
washingtonpost.com
DUESSELDORF, Germany (Reuters) - Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder suffered a major blow on Sunday as projections showed voters had kicked his Social Democrats (SPD) out of government in Germany's most populous state after 39 years in power.
Early projections for the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) put the conservative Christian Democrats at 44.8 percent, above the SPD's 37.6 percent, and enough to win control of a region Schroeder's party has ruled since 1966.
The results will create shock-waves in Berlin, hurting Schroeder's chances of winning a third term next year and probably pushing his party to the left in a bid to win back traditional voters that abandoned them in NRW.
"The disappointment is enormous," Edgar Moron, the SPD's parliamentary floor leader in NRW told German television. "We didn't expect this at all. The trend is clear. The SPD has lost the election. We'll go into opposition and regroup."
Once an SPD stronghold dominated by the coal and steel industry, NRW has fallen on hard times.
Unemployment in the state, which borders on the Netherlands and Belgium and where one in five Germans live, recently pushed above the one million mark to a post-war high.
Voters have blamed Schroeder's controversial labor market reforms, which included jobless benefit cuts, for their woes.
The projections showed the Greens party, junior coalition partners to the SPD in the NRW government until now, winning 6.0 percent. The CDU's likely coalition partners, the liberal Free Democrats, stood at 6.1 percent.
That gives the combined CDU-FDP an absolute majority at 50.9 percent, above the 43.6 percent of the SPD and Greens.
The result is likely to boost the chances that CDU leader Angela Merkel will run against Schroeder in 2006, raising the prospect of Germany's first woman chancellor. ...
----------
Additional information not contained in the article: a few minutes ago SPD leader Müntefering and Chancellor Schröder have proposed to move the next federal election date from autumn 2006 to 2005, one year earlier. Smells like the end of red-green. |
